Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/174

 When I had time to look about me I made some acquaintance with the marvellous country in which I found myself. The population were only settling down from the frantic orgies which followed the discovery of gold. It was but half a dozen years since Melbourne was overrun by successful diggers, whom shopkeepers denominated "the new aristocracy." Drunkenness was their ordinary enjoyment, and the public-houses swarmed at all hours of the day and night with roaring or maudlin topers. The mad recklessness of that time exceeds belief. I have heard from eye-witnesses stories of diggers ordering the entire stock of champagne in a public-house to be decanted into a washing tub, and stopping every passer-by with an invitation to swill; of one frantic toper, when he had made all comers drunk, insisting upon having the bar-counters washed with claret; of pier glasses smashed with a stockwhip in order to make an item worth the attention of a millionaire; of diggers throwing down nuggets to pay for a dram, and declining to accept change; of pipes lighted with a cheque; of sandwiches lined with bank-notes. A favourite recreation of the digger on his pleasure trip was to get married. A bride was not difficult to discover, who permitted herself upon short notice to be adorned with showy silks and driven in an equipage as conspicuous as the circumstances permitted to a bridal which, in many cases, bound them together only during good pleasure. The facility of cheating the digger inflamed the greed it fed; and it is said that some publicans, impatient of the slow process of intoxication, had no scruples of stupefying them with drugs into an insensibility which made robbery easy. The digger need ask in vain for no luxury of which he had ever heard, for an extensive system of forged labels prevailed, and cynical persons predicted that ^the digger would have his taste so perverted that he would turn with disgust from port wine if it was not drugged with bad Scotch whiskey, or brandy which had not been sprinkled with cayenne pepper.

But all this had passed away, and the diggers had settled down to steady industry. Their earnings were not greater than in the ordinary pursuits of the colony, but the employment had the unspeakable charm of not being a servile one.